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The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth Author(S): Joel Mokyr Source: the Journal of Economic History, Vol Economic History Association The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth Author(s): Joel Mokyr Source: The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp. 285-351 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3875064 Accessed: 30-10-2018 16:13 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press, Economic History Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic History This content downloaded from 168.122.222.242 on Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:13:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY VOLUME 65 JUNE 2005 NUMBER 2 The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth JOEL MOKYR The intellectual origins of the Industrial Revolution are traced back to the Baconian program of the seventeenth century, which aimed at expanding the set of useful knowledge and applying natural philosophy to solve technological problems and bring about economic growth. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the West carried out this program through a series of institutional developments that both in- creased the amount of knowledge and its accessibility to those who could make best use of it. Without the Enlightenment, therefore, an Industrial Revolution could not have transformed itself into the sustained economic growth starting in the early nineteenth century. Economic Adam Smith growth had noted that was the "annualnot producea novelty of land and in labour" 1800. In a celebrated passage, had been growing in Britain for a long time.' Yet there is something dis- tinctive in the changes that occurred in the economies of the West after the Industrial Revolution that seem to confirm our intuition that something genuinely important had happened. To be sure, technological innovations, institutional reforms, and fresh ideas do not affect the aggregate level of economic activity abruptly: they need to diffuse from region to region, from activity to activity, cross boundaries and seas, be evaluated, adapted, and refined. Their promoters have to dislodge the entrenched, persuade the The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June 2005). C The Economic History Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 0022-0507. Joel Mokyr is Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, Departments of Economics and History, Northwestern University; and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University. E-mail: [email protected]. This Presidential Address was delivered at the sixty-fourth annual meetings of the Economic His- tory Association in San Jose, California, 11 September 2004. The comments and suggestions of Kenneth Alder, Maristella Botticini, Margaret Jacob, Edward Muir, Cormac 6 Grnida, Avner Greif and Richard Unger are acknowledged. I am indebted to Fabio Braggion, Chip Dickerson, Hillary King, and Michael Silver for research assistance. 1 Smith, Wealth ofNations, pp. 365-66. Modern economic historians have reached similar con- clusions. While none of their methods are uncontroversial, their unanimity seems to indicate that the "assumption" of modern economists such as Robert Lucas and Oded Galor that there was no eco- nomic growth before 1800 is a gross oversimplification. See for instance Clark, "Secret History"; and Snooks, "New Perspectives." 285 This content downloaded from 168.122.222.242 on Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:13:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 286 Mokyr skeptic, and reassure the fearful. It is not surprising, therefore, that what- ever we identify precisely as the Industrial Revolution after 1760 took its sweet time to start affecting GDP per capita in the West in earnest.2 Modem economic growth differs from the processes that Smith identi- fied and that made Britain and the rest of Western Europe so much richer in 1700 than they had been in 1066. To the hard-nosed scholar who insists that "it was all only a matter of degree," one response is that "in economic history, degree is everything." There is a qualitative difference between an economy in which GDP per capita grows at 1.5 percent and one in it which grows at 0.2 percent. Another response is that it was not just a matter of degree. It was qualitatively different in at least three fundamental aspects. First, growth gradually ceased to be a niche phenomenon. Before 1750, growth had been limited to relatively small areas or limited sectors, often a successful city state, a capital of a powerful monarchy, or a limited agri- cultural region. These niches had to spend much of their riches to protect their possessions against greedy neighbors, real-life manifestations of Mancur Olson's "roving bandits" who often killed entire flocks of golden- egg-laying geese. After the Industrial Revolution, it became a more aggre- gative phenomenon, with a substantial number of economies becoming members of the much-coveted "convergence club." Second, pre-1750 growth, such as it was, was dominated by institutional change in its widest sense: law and order, the establishment of commercial relations, credit, trust, and enforceable contracts created the preconditions for wealth to ex- pand through more efficient allocation, exchange and investment.3 Techno- logical change, while never quite absent, was usually too slow and too lo- calized to assume the dominant role it was to take later. Third, premodern growth was normally not sustainable and remained vulnerable to set-backs and shocks, both man-made and natural. The economic glories of the Dutch Republic and Venice had melted away by 1800, just as those of early sixteenth century Spain had vanished by the death of Philip II.4 In the late eighteenth century the relative contribution of technological progress to economic growth compared to other elements began to increase, and the institutional basis supporting this progress was transformed. The result was the Industrial Revolution. It may have been slow, it may have been not all that industrial and even less revolutionary, it may not even have been wholly British, but it was the taproot of modem economic growth. 2 There is a substantial literature that asks with Jeffrey Williamson "why was economic growth so slow during the Industrial Revolution?" although the answers tend to be different from the ones given by him. See Williamson, "Why Was British Growth," pp. 687-712. For some suggested an- swers see Mokyr, "Editor's Introduction," pp. 12-17. 3 See Greif, Institutions. 4 De Vries and Van Der Woude. First Modern Economy; and Drelichman, "American Silver." This content downloaded from 168.122.222.242 on Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:13:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Intellectual Origins 287 How do we explain this change? What has been missing, so far, is a full appreciation of the importance of useful knowledge. Economic decisions are made by individuals on the basis of certain beliefs they hold and knowledge they possess. It recent years, it has once again become "kosher" if not quite de rigueur to speak of "cultural beliefs" following Avner Greif's pathbreaking work on the emergence of institutions that made trade possible in stateless and even largely lawless societies.5 Douglass North refers to shared cultural be- liefs and as the "scaffolds" on which institutions are built.6 But Greif and North are primarily interested in the kind of beliefs that people hold about one another, how others will behave under certain circumstances. My interest here is about the beliefs people held about their physical milieu. In my Gifts of Athena I refer to these beliefs as "useful knowledge," but of course they are but beliefs about the physical environment and natural phenomena, held with higher or lower degrees of unanimity and confidence ("tightness"). Yet all so- cieties have consensus-shaping mechanisms, which determine what kind of beliefs will predominate. I suggest in what is to follow that the change in the rate and nature of economic growth in the West must be explained through developments in the intellectual realm concerning this "useful knowledge." The short answer as to why the West is so much richer today than it was two centuries ago is that collectively, these societies "know" more.7 This does not necessarily mean that each individual on average knows more than his or her great-great grandparent (although that is almost certainly the case given the increased investment in human capital), but that the so- cial knowledge, defined as the union of all pieces of individual knowledge, has expanded. Greater specialization, professionalization, and expertiza- tion have meant that the total amount of knowledge that society controls is vastly larger than ever before. The effective deployment of that knowl- edge, scientific or otherwise, in the service of production is the primary- if not the only-cause for the rapid growth of Western economies in the past centuries. The huge literature that has accumulated on the topic in re- cent years has been ably summarized by Helpman's recent book.8 In what follows, I propose a slightly different approach, based largely on the ex- perience of the Western economies in the eighteenth century. THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Economic historians like to explain economic phenomena with other economic phenomena. The Industrial Revolution, it was felt for many dec- 5 Greif, "Cultural beliefs"; and Temin, "Is it Kosher," pp.
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